An Otaku Tour of Kansai

If you’re an otaku, Tokyo is the best place to be. No other city on the face of the earth can hold a candle to Tokyo in terms of vibrant subcultures and amazing subcultural experiences that are completely open to anyone who stumbles upon them.

Kansai is awesome in its own right, however, and the region is well worth visiting, even if you’re not interested in rich cultural traditions, gorgeous architecture, and delicious food. There are plenty of things for an otaku to do in Kyoto, Osaka, and Takarazuka.

If you’re headed to Kansai, do yourself a favor and get an Icoca card from the JR automated ticket machines as soon as you exit the Shinkansen into the station. The Icoca is the Kansai equivalent of Kantō’s Suica card. Like the Suica, you pay need to pay 2000 yen for an Icoca. 500 of that yen is a deposit that will be returned to you if you turn in the card at a station office, and the rest can be used to go anywhere, anytime, on any vehicle. You can put more money on your Icoca at any station, and your remaining balance will be returned to you along with your deposit when you return the card. If you already have a Suica, you can use it for all JR rail lines in Kansai, but it doesn’t work anywhere else. Since the best way to get around Kyoto is by bus or taxi, and since the best way to get around Osaka is by subway, it’s definitely worth getting yourself an Icoca.

Kyoto

Besides being filled with temples and famous historic sites and traditional Japanese arts and so on, Kyoto is a tech hub and a college town populated by students, artists, and young professionals. The infinite alleyways snaking behind the main boulevards are lousy with ultra-modern restaurants, tiny theme bars, hostess clubs, host clubs, crazily decorated clothing boutiques, and art spaces the size of a hotel room. Alcohol of all types is cheap, plentiful, and delicious, and strange and fascinating things happen on the streets and along the Kamo River after dark, especially on the weekends. Kyoto is a great city to get lost in.

The top Kyoto attraction for otaku is the Kyoto International Manga Museum. This place is amazing. As an added bonus, it’s also bilingual and Anglophone-friendly. The permanent exhibit is a hyper-illustrated walkthrough of the history and development of manga, the tools and artistic techniques used to create manga, the publishing culture of manga, the genres of manga, and the internationalization of manga. The museum also hosts special exhibits showcasing the work of specific manga artists and illustrators, many of whom are local to Kyoto.

All along the walls of the museum are bookcases on which are shelved the most massive collection of manga I’ve ever seen (and I have seen some massive collections, such as the one housed in the Yoshihiro Yonezawa Memorial Library). Most of this manga is Japanese, but a sizable portion is foreign, including all sorts of North American and European translations and originals. The best part about this library is that you can take anything down from the shelves and read it for as long as you want. The museum also has a smaller library of academic materials dedicated to manga. Again, most of these materials are in Japanese, but there’s also a ton of stuff in English and other European languages. Was there some obscure manga exhibition in Germany? They have the catalog. Was there an issue of The Comics Journal from ten years ago that mentioned shōjo manga? They have that issue. The museum also publishes a few high quality pamphlets and periodicals that you’re free to take as you please (my favorite is a small magazine highlighting the areas of Kyoto featured in recent anime and manga).

To get to the museum, take the subway to the Karasuma-Oike Station, which is served by the Karasuma and the Tōzai lines. Take Exit 2 out of the station, turn to your right at the top of the staircase, and walk for a minute or two until you see the museum on your left. The museum is a converted primary school building, and you’ll know it when you see it. The pennants hanging from the telephone poles along the street in front of it help. Because the museum is awesome, they’ve posted an illustrated map explaining how to get there.

There are also a small handful of otaku specialty stores clustered along Teramachi between Sanjō and Shijō (these are all the names of streets/walkways). If you’d like to get to this area from the Manga Museum, go back to the intersection where you came out of the subway, cross the street, and turn left on Oike to go towards the Kamo River. Walk for about ten blocks (which actually isn’t that far) and enter the Teramachi covered shopping arcade on your right. To get to this area from anywhere else, start at the Sanjō-Keihan Station and cross over the Kamo River on the Sanjō bridge. Keep heading west on Sanjō for about two blocks until the street dead-ends into a covered pedestrian shopping arcade called “Sanjo Cupola.” Keep going straight through the Sanjo Cupola until you emerge into the open air (there will be a giant mechanical crab ahead on your right), and immediately turn left into the Teramachi covered shopping arcade.

After walking for awhile, you’ll see a Melon Books above a drugstore to your right. Melon Books sells hardcore pornographic manga and doujinshi for men, so enter at your own risk. Further ahead on your right you’ll see a bookstore called Manga・Can (漫画館), which is a great place to browse and discover new manga titles. A bit further ahead on your right is the Kyoto branch of Gamers, which has games (mainly of the erotic variety) on the fourth floor and manga and doujinshi on the fifth floor. Most of the merchandise stocked by Gamers is targeted at men, but the store isn’t as hardcore as Melon Books and caries many things of interest to female otaku as well.

Running parallel to Teramachi to the east (one street over to your left if you’re walking towards Shijō) is another shopping arcade called Shinkyogoku. Right before you emerge onto Shijō while walking along Shinkyogoku, there will be an Animate to your right on the second-floor level above a small open plaza. Like all Animate branches, the Kyoto store is distinctive. It has a large and well-stocked manga section that showcases work by local artists, work that has won regional manga prizes, and work appealing to yuri sensibilities.

If cross Shijō on Teramachi, you’ll find yourself on a small, uncovered street. Several dozen feet past Shijō, there will be a five-story Tora no Ana on your left and a five-story bookstore called Shinchō Shoten (信長書店) on your right. Both stores are custom-made for otaku.

Right next to Shinchō Shoten, in a tiny alley about twelve feet past the bookstore and leading off the right, is one of the best-kept secrets of Kyoto: a tiny vegetarian restaurant and sake bar called Mikōan (彌光庵). The food is cheap and delicious and varied enough that no two people will get the same meal even if they order the same thing. The décor and atmosphere are like something out of an urban fantasy novel. There are also several adorable, fluffy cats wandering around the restaurant at any given time, and they don’t mind being friendly if you engage them. Mikōan is all about how awesome Kyoto can be if you wander off the beaten path.

Osaka

Osaka never gets enough credit. Sure, it’s not as rich or as populous as Tokyo, but it’s still a huge city filled with interesting places to go. The urban landscape of Osaka resembles that of Tokyo, but it’s different in all sorts of neat ways. You really will hear people speak Osaka dialect here, which is lots of fun if you’re learning Japanese.

Nanba is the Osaka equivalent of Akihabara. This neighborhood runs alongside a broad avenue called Yotsuhashi-suji or, more appropriately, in the smaller streets and alleys branching off from either side of Yotsuhashi-suji. Nanba Station is an epic mess of stores and restaurants and hotels, and there are many ways to navigate your way outside, but the area you want to be in is on the northeast side of the station. Depending on what train line you’re coming from, it might be easiest to walk through the Takashimaya department store and exit the building from the main entrance. In any case, a small street called Nansan-dōri snakes along the west side of the station. Follow it until you see a Taito Station, and turn left past the arcade. If you keep walking west along the small road (which is still called Nansan-dōri even after if veers away from the station), you’ll begin to see otaku-related stores on your right. The area between Nanba Station, Nansan-dōri, and Yotsuhashi-suji is where all of the electronics stores, maid cafés, used video game stores, and specialty book stores are. You will find a Melon Books and a Yellow Submarine along these backstreets, but, if you want to go to the K-Books and Animate, follow Nansan-dōri until the big intersection and turn right on Yotsuhashi-suji. The K-Books and Animate will be down the street to your right, and the Mandarake will be across the street on your left.

If you’re looking for doujinshi, it’s definitely worth your while to visit the K-Books here, which stocks tons of work produced by Kansai artists. Doujinshi for large fandoms are more or less equally distributed across Kantō and Kansai, but work for small fandoms from small regional conventions doesn’t always make it to Tokyo. There are also a number of original doujinshi at the Nanba K-Books that don’t fall into pre-established genres and resemble nothing so much as they do North American indie comics.

For an otaku, I think the major attraction of Osaka is the Umeda Mandarake. According to fanlore, this is *the* Mandarake, the Mandarake to end all Mandarakes, and the One True Mandarake. The Umeda Mandarake is a sprawling three-story building stuffed to the gills with crap, garbage, and treasure. The building itself looks (and smells) like it should be condemned, and the soft, creaky floor literally sags under the weight of all the junk in the store. Otaku relics are lovingly displayed in glass showcases, while the dim overhead lighting flickers and throws shadows around the piles of unopened cardboard boxes stacked in the corners. The clerks cosplay, and there is a small stage for performances on the second floor that also serves as a dais for life-size renditions of pop culture icons. This place must really been seen to be believed.

Also, if you’re looking for original doujinshi drawn by artists like Yuki Kaori and CLAMP, this is the place to go. In addition, on the staircase landing between the second and third stories, there is a table with a few stacks of “Mandarake Note” notebooks in which visitors to the store can draw and scribble away to their hearts’ content with the art tools provided. If you take the time to flip through some of the old notebooks, you might be lucky enough to catch a glimpse of some really familiar names and art styles. If you’re an a creative mood, you can take over your own notebook page.

Fittingly for a quest of such magnitude, it’s a pain in the ass to get to the store. The easiest method is to take one of the south exists out of the JR Osaka Station (or the Hankyū Umeda Station across the street), get in a taxi, and pay the driver ¥660 to take you to the Osaka Tokyu Inn hotel. If you’re facing the Tokyu Inn, you’ll notice a Small Alley of Ultimate Sketchiness running alongside the right side of the hotel building. Turn left into the alleyway and keep walking until you emerge into a shopping arcade with the Mandarake right in front of you.

If you want to be adventurous, you can go on foot. Take the Mitōsuji South Exit from JR Osaka Station (which can be accessed from JR rail lines and the subway lines) and cross the street under the huge pedestrian bridge. Alternately, take the South Central Exit from JR Osaka Station and climb the stairs to get on top of the huge pedestrian bridge. Either way, you’re heading for the Umeda Hankyū Building. What you’re going to want to do, either by going around, going under, or going through, is to get to the other side of this building. At street level on the other side of the building you’ll see an intersection with a concrete island in the middle of it, and, on the far side of the intersection, a covered shopping arcade called “E Street.” This shopping arcade goes on for a few blocks and in the middle crosses over an open street and changes its name to Hankyū Tōtsū Shōtengai (阪急東通商店街). The Mandarake is on towards the end of the shopping arcade on the left. The shopping arcade itself is tacky and raucous, and any of the restaurants lining the passage can provide you with a ticket out of Sober City on the Cheap Alcohol Express, if you’re interested in that sort of cultural experience.

While you’re in the area, the Osaka Pokémon Center is on the thirteenth floor of the Daimaru department store above the South Central Exit of JR Osaka Station. The store has all sorts of special goods connected to Osaka and the Johto region that you can’t get anywhere else, as well as special Spot Pass promotions for fans who bring their Nintendo DS with them.

Takarazuka

Takarazuka is a mid-sized suburb located about a twenty minute train ride away from Osaka (and a forty-five minute ride from Kyoto, with one transfer in the middle). Not only is the area around the station interesting (it’s like an exaggerated fantasy version of the Europe described by Marcel Proust), but the city is also home to two major otaku-related attractions.

These two attractions are the Takarazuka Grand Theater building and the Osamu Tezuka Memorial Museum. Finding your way around is half the fun of an excursion to Takarazuka, so I won’t give directions. Let it suffice to say that you’re looking for the Hana no Michi (花のみち). This is an actual street divided by a raised walking path lined with flowers. It’s just as romantic as it sounds, and the Takarazuka Revue themed bronze statues along the path add to its charm.

The Takarazuka Grand Theater is the home base of the Takarazuka Revue, which is fabulousness incarnate. Even if you can’t catch a performance (if you do want to see a performance, you’ll want to book your seat well in advance), it’s fun to wander around the massive theater complex just to drink in the atmosphere. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to see a fan club; and, if you’re even luckier, you might get to spot a performer. The Quatre Rêves gift shop, which is easily accessible from the Hana no Michi, stocks all sorts of CDs and DVDs, as well as tons of glossy print material. Of special interest are “bromides,” which are laminated photos of Takarazuka actresses dressed in the costumes of their famous roles. If you’re not interested in spending money on pictures of glamorous ladies, you can get all sorts of material for free in the form of pamphlets, leaflets, and promotional fliers. There are also television screens set up around the theater complex where you can chill out and enjoy videotaped awesomeness at your leisure.

At the end of the Hana no Michi and down the street a bit is the Osamu Tezuka Memorial Museum, which is marked by a giant sculpture of Tezuka’s Phoenix just outside the main entrance. The museum hosts rotating exhibitions in a spacious and well-designed gallery space, but the permanent exhibition of Tezuka memorabilia is also interesting. Not only does the museum display the usual array of photographs and animation stills, but it also showcases the notebooks that Tezuka kept as a young adult. Even if you’re not a Tezuka fan, it’s difficult not to be awed by the range and scope of the artist’s imagination as represented in these notebooks. The museum has a handful of interactive installations, but my favorite is the Animation Studio (アニメ工房) on the basement floor, where anyone can sit at a computer station, draw pictures with the tablet and stylus provided, and then animate them. There’s also an open library with editions of Tezuka manga from around the world, as well as ample space to sit down, relax, and read. You’ll see visitors dressed in Tezuka cosplay (with floopy berets and seventies glasses), and the entire building is covered with images, murals, etchings, and sculptures. Visiting the museum is a unique experience and well worth the trip out to Takarazuka.

In conclusion, Kansai is a great area to visit, and not just for temples and historical sites. Kyoto and Osaka and Takarazuka can be just as edgy, quirky, and fun as Tokyo, and there’s no reason for a short-term or a long-term visitor with otaku inclinations not to make the trip down to Kansai.

Reading Japanese Literature in Japanese

I started taking Japanese language classes as a college freshman in 2002, and I will begrudgingly admit that, almost ten years later, I’m still not entirely fluent in the language. True linguistic fluency is almost infinitely multifaceted and difficult to attain in any foreign language, especially when that foreign language is not regularly spoken in one’s everyday environment. The best way to attain a high proficiency in Japanese is to move to Japan and live there for an extended period of time. Nothing that I can suggest here can serve as a substitute for actually going abroad and living one’s life in Japanese, so the best advice I can possibly give is – go! Figure out how your school or employer can help fund your sojourn, apply for a passport, and go!

In the meantime, however, you don’t even need to leave your bedroom in order to start reading Japanese. Most Japanese language curricula focus on giving students the tools they need in order to read nonfiction texts such as newspapers, essays, and academic articles. Of course this type of instruction is useful, but a sentence like “the economy suffered a sudden downturn in the fourth quarter” requires a different set of linguistic skills than a sentence like “the stars shone brightly in the sky,” especially in Japanese. It’s therefore up to many language learners to figure out how to read Japanese fiction on their own.

What follows is a guide for students of the Japanese language who want to start reading literature – whatever their definition of “literature” may be – in Japanese. In this essay I will detail the necessary linguistic foundations before discussing useful tools and entry points for getting started. Beginning to read in Japanese may seem like a huge hurtle to clear for anyone who’s ever held an entire Japanese novel in her hands, and I’m not going to promise that it won’t be difficult, especially at first. It’s not impossible, however, and it can even be enjoyable.

Foundations

I think that, at an absolute minimum, one needs two full years of college-level Japanese before it makes sense to start reading Japanese language texts. There are two primary reasons for this. The first reason is that it takes about two years to become comfortable reading the Japanese scripts as they appear on a page. Basic reading skills, such as figuring out where words begin and end, figuring out who is speaking, and figuring out how to look up unknown words, will be unavailable to a student who doesn’t have two years’ worth of knowledge of kana usage, kanji, and grammar patterns. Without these skills, the characters printed on the page are just so much linguistic slurry. The second reason one needs two years of Japanese is that it takes about that long to develop a familiarity with the way the Japanese language works outside of an artificial environment (such as a classroom or a textbook). In Japanese, as in English, writers abbreviate words, leave out words, make up words, use words in strange ways, bend the rules of grammar, and do fun things with dialog and dialect. These are not the sorts of things one can look up in a dictionary, so one needs to know the rules well enough to identify which rule has been broken. Both reasons I have given are really the same reason – literature is high level writing, and one needs to accumulate experience with the language in order to understand it.

There are obvious benefits to enrolling in college level Japanese language classes, but I realize that not everyone has the necessary resources to do so. Thankfully, there are some excellent textbooks on the market that make self study easy. My absolute favorite is the Genki series, which comes with a matching set of workbooks. The main benefits of the Genki series are that it is ergonomically formatted, it teaches vocabulary and grammar in a well organized and easily digestible manner, and it contains reading passages and practice drills that help you use what you’re supposed to be learning in the most efficient way possible. I also think the Genki series tackles the challenge of learning to read written Japanese in a superlatively intelligent and user-friendly manner. The Genki series neither gives you too much information (like an expensive hardcover textbook such as Yokoso! does) or too little information (like a popular study guide such as Adventures in Japanese does), and it also integrates grammar and vocabulary seamlessly into speech patterns and the written language, unlike mass market texts such as those created by companies like Berlitz and Rosetta Stone. The two Genki books will teach you the rules of Japanese; and then, once you’ve mastered these rules, you can go on to the next book in the series, An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese, which will teach you how to apply the rules to real conversations and reading material.

In whatever way you choose to study, it’s good to have those two years of Japanese language experience under your belt before you start trying to read real texts. Of course language learning ability differs from one person to the next; but, if you have less than two years of experience, attempting to read Japanese is more than likely going to be an exercise in frustration. I think the problem most people have, however, is not diving headfirst into real Japanese, but rather waiting too long to get their feet wet. I don’t think there’s any real need to wait until you’ve learned all the grammar points or all the kanji before you start reading – all you need is the right set of tools.

Useful Tools

As with many realms of study in the twenty-first century, the most useful tools available to you are digital, and the foremost of these digital tools is the internet. As wireless internet access is not available in all times and all places (especially in Japan), however, it’s always good to be in the possession of more concrete tools as well.

The single most useful tool available to someone moving past the initial stages of Japanese language study is a denshi jisho, or electronic dictionary. A denshi jisho will include a wide range of dictionaries, including the Genius series of English/Japanese and Japanese/English dictionaries. (Models with dictionaries for other languages, such as French and Chinese, are available as well.) Denshi jisho will also, without fail, include a Japanese dictionary, which is like a combination of a Japanese-language OED and an illustrated encyclopedia that may include sound (just in case you need to know the difference between the calls of two species of crickets, for example). Electronic Japanese dictionaries come equipped with a feature called gyaku-jibiki, which allows the user to search for a word by its last character instead of by its first, as well as many other search tools that accommodate the difficulties involved in figuring out how any given kanji is read.

If you don’t know a word in any of the entries you’re reading, most denshi jisho have a “jump” feature that allows you to highlight a word on the screen and then go to that word’s entry in any other dictionary available on your machine (including the Japanese/English one) before returning to the original entry. This is useful if, for example, you’re using one of the more specialized dictionaries available on your denshi jisho. Depending on the model you choose, these specialized dictionaries may include a Classical Japanese dictionary, an encyclopedia of Japanese history, an index of Japanese poetry, a dictionary for katakana words and onomatopoeia, a dictionary for four-character phrases, a botanical reference guide, and so on.

One of the most useful features of any denshi jisho is its kanji dictionary. Learning to use one of these things is a cultural and linguistic experience in and of itself. If your model has a stylus and a trackpad, all you need to do is to write the character – these pieces of equipment have better handwriting recognition software than iPhones and Wacom tablets. If your model doesn’t have a trackpad (and many of them don’t), there are still plenty of plenty of ways to look up kanji, the most useful of which is by a combination of radical and stroke count. Once you find the character in the dictionary, you will turn up a wealth of information, including how it pronounced, a list of words beginning with and including the character, a brief etymology and a Chinese pronunciation guide. Once you get used to your denshi jisho, searching for kanji becomes quick, easy, and painless. No paper source in existence can compete with a digital kanji dictionary.

Denshi jisho can be purchased at any electronics store (and many large bookstores) in Japan, but they’re harder to come by abroad. If you live near a major urban center, Japanese bookstores (such as Kinokuniya) will generally have a selection of denshi jisho on display. You can also order one through Amazon.co.jp, whose restrictions on shipping electronics overseas doesn’t apply to these devices. The two most common brands are Sharp and Canon. There is a greater difference between individual models than there is between the two brands as a whole, but lower price range Sharp models tend to be more technologically sophisticated (with trackpads, color screens, auditory pronunciation guides, and embedded video), while most Canon models have an English language menu setting and touchscreens (which is great for highlighting words and “jumping” between dictionary entries).

If you don’t want to invest in a denshi jisho, there are many excellent resources on the internet, one of which is a site called Denshi Jisho, which features a great kanji lookup system. My personal favorite online Japanese dictionary is Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC, which will return tons of entries and example sentences for any search, including searches for internet slang, English-derived portmanteaus and other neologisms, and onomatopoeia so obscure that they don’t appear in Japanese dictionaries. If you’re in the habit of reading Japanese online, a popup browser plug-in called Rikaichan can define any text you highlight in your web browser (although it doesn’t always work so well with Flash-embedded text).

I am given to understand that there are also many types of tools available on the iPhone and the iPad. I don’t have enough experience with either of these devices to make recommendations, but a quick search on Google will turn up dozens of lists and reviews.

Getting Started

Speaking from an almost complete lack of training in linguistics, I can confidently say that some types of language are more difficult to read than others. As it just so happens, however, the types of language that you’re interested in are going to be much easier for you to learn to read than the types of language you’re not interested in. What this means is that, once you’re ready to read, it’s not necessary use “training wheels.” If you’re interested in reading mystery novels, read mystery novels. If you’re interested in reading manga, read manga. If you’re interested in reading novels by Kawabata Yasunari, read novels by Kawabata Yasunari (they’re actually not that difficult).

I don’t mean to suggest that one can simply pick up a book and read it. What I am trying to suggest is that there’s no need to slowly work your way up through material of increasing levels of difficulty until you’re finally able to read what you actually want to read. You don’t need to slog through fourth grade level readers or collections of fairy tales written for children if you think stuff like that is stupid and boring. You don’t have to muddle your way through the confusing layouts and endless notes and vocabulary lists of “Japanese-English parallel text” books like Reading Real Japanese or Breaking into Japanese Literature if you don’t want to. You shouldn’t feel the need to start with something “easy” like the Japanese translations of the Harry Potter books (which aren’t actually that easy, as it turns out). These sorts of preparatory exercises really aren’t necessary.

That being said, some books are easier to read than others. Even among manga titles by the same artist that all use simple vocabulary and furigana, some are going to be easier to understand by virtue of good editing and solid storytelling. For example, Ōkubo Atsushi’s popular shōnen series Soul Eater is much easier to read in Japanese than his debut series B. Ichi. The same goes with literature. To offer an example from my own experience, the first writer I tried to read in Japanese was a nightmare until I figured out that what she wrote in the sixties is infinitely easier to read than what she wrote in the eighties. Before I was able to arrive at this conclusion, however, I gave up on her altogether in order to read another writer writing at the same time on roughly similar themes using much simpler vocabulary and sentence structures. The point I’d like to illustrate with these examples is that there’s no shame in giving up on something difficult in order to search out something easier. Reading in Japanese is not about punishing yourself or training yourself through hardship; it’s about experiencing the pleasure of becoming immersed in something you enjoy. You shouldn’t be hunched over a desk with a dictionary and a notebook; you should be chilling out in the bath or in a hammock in your backyard.

Unless you’re preternaturally brilliant, you’re going to go through an awkward stage in which you make embarrassing mistakes in interpretation and can’t read more than two or three pages at a time. The progress you’ll be able to make during this awkward stage shouldn’t be underestimated, however. You’ll learn things about the Japanese language that you never would have learned in a textbook, such as how to appreciate the nuances of word choice and the subtle differences in writing styles. Reading a page at a time will turn into reading two pages at a time, and two pages will turn into three pages, and three pages will eventually turn into just one more chapter, which will eventually turn into I am not sleeping until I finish this.

In other words, reading Japanese is hard…

…but it gets better!

Good luck!

Tokyo on Foot

Title: Tokyo on Foot
Author/Artist: Florent Chavouet
Publication Year: 2011
Publisher: Tuttle
Pages: 206

While I was in New York City for the New York Comic Con last weekend, I met a friend of mine for lunch. Accompanying her was her new fiancé, a really cool guy who’s lived and traveled all over Asia. All over Asia except for Japan, that is. He said that, based on the Japanese movies he’s seen, he’s a bit afraid of Tokyo. It seems too big, and too modern, and too noisy – hyperkinetic and almost like science fiction. I asked him what Japanese movies he’s seen. Akira and Lost in Translation, he told me.

I think that, for a lot of people who are familiar with Japan but haven’t actually been there, Japan exists not as a real place where real people live but rather as some sort of strange and exotic fantasy land called “Japan.” For some people, “Japan” consists of towering skyscrapers and flashing lights and all-night karaoke rooms, while for some people “Japan” is all about green mountains and cherry blossoms and Zen temples and tea houses. There is a touch of good old fashioned Orientalism at play here; but, then again, Japan actively markets itself in such a way as to encourage these assumptions, even domestically. Furthermore, the fantasy of “Japan” is perhaps not so fantastical – places like the 109 Building in Shibuya and the Philosopher’s Path in Kyoto really do exist.

In the end, though, Japan is a real place where real people live, and it’s not any more beautiful or ugly or modern or rural than, say, New Jersey. What I love about Florent Chavouet’s Tokyo on Foot is that it visually depicts Tokyo as a real city with many, many faces. Yes, there are huge buildings and busy intersections in West Shinjuku, but there are also tiny restaurants and old houses on the verge of falling apart in West Ikebukuro. And then there’s everything in between, from architectural oddities in Ueno to cute little bars in Daikanyama to Shintō shrines nestled between skyscrapers in Takadanobaba. Chavouet draws them all beautifully.

Tokyo on Foot is divided into neighborhoods, with each section opening with a drawing of the local kōban (police station) and a highly detailed annotated map. What follows this map are several pages of drawings of buildings, street corners, storefronts, landmarks, and occasionally people that the artist observed in the neighborhood. Most of these drawings occupy a full page, and all of them are in high-contrast full color. Chavouet’s drawings of people are caricatured, and his drawings of buildings and objects are almost photorealistic, but all of his subjects receive the same careful attention to detail. Chavouet’s medium of choice is colored pencils, and his pencil work really brings out the colors and textures of everything he draws. Really, it’s gorgeous.

Chavouet often accompanies his sketches with annotations. He’ll make small notes concerning the weather, how he got to a certain location, and what interactions he had with the people who watched him drawing. He’ll also include small cultural details, like the fact the Mr. Donuts offers free coffee refills. In each section, there is usually at least a page or two of smaller sketches illustrating concepts like the vast insect population of Tokyo or how to make a disco lamp using cheap materials from Tokyu Hands (“like Target, only better”). There is occasionally political commentary as well, such as when the artist draws the heads of conservative male politicians attached to the bodies of young women in bikinis or mocks the nonsense spewed by the right wing campaign trucks that tour the streets of Tokyo (“Down with kisses and TLC, long live war and mean people”). In a scattered and roundabout manner, Chavouet also turns a satirical eye on the police officers who repeatedly harassed him for parking his bike in the wrong place and/or loitering (in other words, staying in one place long enough to draw it).

What Chavouet draws is a Tokyo that isn’t some futuristic (or idyllic) alien city but rather a city where people live, work, drink, smoke, have trouble finding parking, chill out in coffee shops to get out of the rain, hang out with their friends, sometimes act like assholes or creeps in public, take lunch breaks in the park, and all the other things people do in a huge urban area filled with millions of people. Through his pencil work, Chavouet depicts the beauty of the monumental, the grimy, the quaint, and the pedestrian. Rows of potted plants outside of someone’s house in a small back alley just behind a major train station can be just as calming and peaceful as a painstakingly manicured Zen garden, and telephone poles covered in posters can be just as awe-inspiring as Corinthian columns.

I can’t wrap my head around how much I love this book. Get this book for yourself. Get this book for your hipster art school friends. Get this book for your mom who doesn’t understand why you care about Japan in the first place. And get this book for your friend’s fiancé who thinks Japan is exactly like Akira. At least, that’s what I plan on doing.

How to Do Research on Japanese Literature

This is an introductory guide to doing research that I wrote for an undergraduate class on Japanese literature that I’m teaching this fall. Because I wish someone had given me this sort of information when I was a freshman in college, I’m posting this guide online with the hope that it will prove useful to a broader audience.

Before I begin, I have two pieces of advice that should prove helpful to the research process.

(1) The success of your search is largely dependent upon the strength of your search terms. Instead of searching for material on a broad topic, search instead for a key figure closely associated with that topic. For example, search for “Kirino Natsuo” instead of “Japanese mystery fiction,” or “Tsuruya Namboku IV” instead of “zankoku no bi.”

(2) Once you have successfully located a book or article, pay close attention to its footnotes and bibliography. These citations will help steer you toward work related to your topic that might not appear in more specialized searches, and they’re a very good place to start looking for material in Japanese.

This guide is divided into three sections: academic sources (that require a subscription through a university library), extra-academic sources (that do not require a subscription), and Japanese-language sources (which also do not require a subscription). Since most basic information, such as biographical details and publishing history, is readily available online, this guide focuses on databases that will help you find books and articles on a given topic.

Academic Sources

JSTOR
This database offers full-text academic articles for download as PDF files. It also contains citations of articles that can be downloaded directly from the websites of academic journals. Some of these journals, like Monumenta Nipponica, require a university subscription in order to be accessed, while others, like intersections, are freely available to anyone.

Project MUSE
This is another database offering full-text academic articles available for download, but it draws its search results from a slightly different selection of journals. For example, articles from the journal Mechademia are available on Project MUSE but not on JSTOR.

The Bibliography of Asian Studies
This is a specialty database that will display book-length monographs and translations in addition to academic articles. It will also occasionally display academic work written in French and German. This database contains only citations, however, and not full-text articles. Like JSTOR and Project MUSE, the Bibliography of Asian Studies must be accessed through a university connection or university proxy server.

EBSCO
Unlike the above three databases, this collection of databases is intended for a less “academic” user. Searches made on this aggregate will thus turn up sources such as general interest magazine articles and book reviews, although occasionally an academic article might show up as well. EBSCO is usually available in public libraries, but a subscription is still necessary to access the site.

Extra-Academic Sources

Amazon
The primary goal of Amazon is to make money, and Amazon can’t make money if it can’t help you find what you’re looking for. Amazon’s advanced search engine makes it perhaps the single best place to find academic books either on or related to your topic. Not only does Amazon search titles, but it also searches tables of contents and whatever portions of the text it has available for free viewing, which usually includes the Library of Congress cataloging data. As a result, Amazon is one of the few places where less specific search terms can be used effectively. Amazon search results will include the newest books and books that aren’t even in print yet, which I believe makes the site a necessary supplement to library catalogs.

Wikipedia
It’s always good to check the Wikipedia article(s) on your topic for their citations. Academics (especially grad students working on cutting-edge research) are not above editing Wikipedia articles and citing their own books and essays. Wikipedia is therefore a relatively painless way to find just-published studies, especially when you’re researching a topic related to contemporary Japan.

Google Scholar
Google Scholar displays citations that will link you either directly to Google Books or to an article on a database like JSTOR. Google Scholar is therefore useful to people who have access to InterLibrary Loan (through a public library) but not to a university library and its resources.

University Library Webpages
I have never encountered a university library webpage that requires you to enter login information in order to search its online database. Thus, even if you’re not a student at a particular university, you can still search that library’s collection. Moreover, the library websites of major universities usually contain pages devoted to a specific area of study (for example, here is Columbia University’s page on Japanese Studies), although you typically need to be connected through the university to access the databases that are listed on these pages. In any case, it has been my experience that American university libraries will generally let you physically enter the building even if you’re not affiliated with the university, although you won’t be able to check out books without special permission.

Japanese-Language Sources

National Diet Library OPAC
An institution similar to the American Library of Congress, the National Diet Library houses every book published in Japan. The library’s OPAC (online public access catalog) is your key to searching their collection. If you’re lazy like me and prefer to read articles instead of books, you can use the library’s specialized magazine and article search (雑誌記事索引の検索). You can search also run searches in English, but be aware that these searches will only turn up books and articles written in English and other foreign languages. If you happen to be in Japan, it is possible to visit both the Tokyo and Kyoto branches of the National Diet Library without any sort of credentials or special registration. The library staff will find and deliver any materials you request, and they will photocopy articles and book chapters for a small fee. If you can’t make it to Japan, the library website contains many other services and features besides the OPAC, some of which are explained by this essay.

WINE (Waseda University OPAC)
For more specialized academic searches, you can try using the OPAC of a major Japanese research university. I have found that the one hosted by Waseda University has been the most helpful. Running a search on a university library’s collection will often turn up a different (and more useful) set of books and journals than a search of the National Diet Library, and university library call numbers can be extremely useful when placing a request on InterLibrary Loan. Unfortunately, it is extraordinarily difficult to enter Japanese university libraries in person if one is not already affiliated with the university.

CiNii
While a university library OPAC is good for academic books, CiNii is a great place to go for academic articles. A search on CiNii will get you far more relevant results than a search through the National Diet Library, and all entries are linked directly to WorldCAT, which makes it easy to request articles through InterLibrary Loan. It is possible to download PDF copies of certain articles from CiNii, but you must be a registered user, a privilege for which you have to pay. You must also pay for each download. I have never felt the need to pay these user fees, so I’m not sure how well the paid service works, but I have still found the site to be extraordinarily useful.

Amazon Japan
Because so many general interest books and journals are published on specialized topics in Japan, Amazon Japan is perhaps the single most convenient source for literary, cinematic, and cultural criticism written in Japanese. Although Amazon Japan doesn’t offer discounts like the American Amazon, the site is somehow able to keep books in stock that are almost impossible to find anywhere else. Furthermore, once you add a book to your cart, you are instantly given the titles of two dozen other books and journal issues on your topic. Just because you have put something in your cart doesn’t mean you have to buy it (especially since international shipping is expensive), and Amazon Japan contains all the publishing information you will need to request a book or journal through InterLibrary Loan. Never underestimate the power of Amazon.

*****

As I mentioned earlier, this guide is meant to be both brief and introductory. More specialized research will obviously require more specialized databases, indexes, and dictionaries. Thankfully, a great deal of the information that used to be contained only in rare books is now freely accessible online. The best place to start looking for specialized resources is through the web pages of the libraries of major research institutions in America and Canada. It is also possible to get in touch with the librarians and bibliographers of the East Asian Studies collections of these libraries if you’re stuck. People put things online so that they can be accessed. This information exists so that you can make use of it. Whether you’re a professional student or just someone who’s curious about a particular topic, you will definitely be able to find out what you want to know and get your hands on all sorts of interesting things to read.

The image at the top of this guide illustrates the concept of studying by moonlight reflected off of snow in winter and by the luminescence of a bag of fireflies in summer. When it comes to research, where there is a will, there is a way. Good luck!